Diaspora politics vs. Realpolitik or Why your local daily will never tell you about a French mastermind behind the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa....
Samuel Huntington, "The Erosion of American National Interests," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, no. 5
(September-October 1997)
mtholyoke.edu
Excerpt:
COMMERCIALISM AND ETHNICITY
The lack of national interests that command widespread support does not imply a return to isolationism. America remains involved in the world, but its involvement is now directed at commercial and ethnic interests rather than national interests. Economic and ethnic particularism define the current American role in the world. The institutions and capabilities -- political, military, economic, intelligence -- created to serve a grand national purpose in the Cold War are now being suborned and redirected to serve narrow subnational, transnational, and even nonnational purposes. Increasingly people are arguing that these are precisely the interests foreign policy should serve.
The Clinton administration has given priority to "commercial diplomacy," making the promotion of American exports a primary foreign policy objective. It has been successful in wringing access to some foreign markets for American products. Commercial achievements have become a primary criterion for judging the performance of American ambassadors. President Clinton may well be spending more time promoting American sales abroad than doing anything else in foreign affairs. If so, that would be a dramatic sign of the redirection of American foreign policy. In case after case, country after country, the dictates of commercialism have prevailed over other purposes including human rights, democracy, alliance relationships, maintaining the balance of power, technology export controls, and other strategic and political considerations described by one administration official as "stratocrap and globaloney."(5) "Many in the administration, Congress, and the broader foreign policy community," a former senior official in the Clinton Commerce Department argued in these pages, "still believe that commercial policy is a tool of foreign policy, when it should more often be the other way around -- the United States should use all its foreign policy levers to achieve commercial goals." The funds devoted to promoting commercial goals should be greatly increased; the personnel working on these goals should be upgraded and professionalized; the agencies concerned with export promotion need to be strengthened and reorganized. Landing the contract is the name of the game in foreign policy.
Or at least it is the name of one game. The other game is the promotion of ethnic interests. While economic interests are usually subnational, ethnic interests are generally transnational or nonnational. The promotion of particular businesses and industries may not involve a broad public good, as does a general reduction in trade barriers, but it does promote the interests of some Americans. Ethnic groups promote the interests of people and entities outside the United States. Boeing has an interest in aircraft sales and the Polish-American Congress in help for Poland, but the former benefits residents of Seattle, the latter residents of the Eastern Europe.
The growing role of ethnic groups in shaping American foreign policy is reinforced by the waves of recent immigration and by the arguments for diversity and multiculturalism. In addition, the greater wealth of ethnic communities and the dramatic improvements in communications and transportation now make it much easier for ethnic groups to remain in touch with their home countries. As a result, these groups are being transformed from cultural communities within the boundaries of a state into diasporas that transcend these boundaries. State-based diasporas, that is, trans-state cultural communities that control at least one state, are increasingly important and increasingly identify with the interests of their homeland. "Full assimilation into their host societies," a leading expert, Gabriel Sheffer, has observed in Survival "has become unfashionable among both established and incipient state-based diasporas . . . many diasporal communities neither confront overwhelming pressure to assimilate nor feel any marked advantage in assimilating into their host societies or even obtaining citizenship there." Since the United States is the premier immigrant country in the world, it is most affected by the shifts from assimilation to diversity and from ethnic group
to diaspora.
During the Cold War, immigrants and refugees from communist countries usually vigorously opposed, for political and ideological reasons, the governments of their home countries and actively supported American anticommunist policies against them. Now, diasporas in the United States support their home governments. Products of the Cold War, Cuban-Americans ardently support U.S. anti-Castro policies. Chinese-americans, in contrast, overwhelmingly pressure the United States to adopt favorable policies towards China. Culture has supplanted ideology in shaping attitudes in diaspora populations.
Diasporas provide many benefits to their home countries. Economically prosperous diasporas furnish major financial support to the homeland, Jewish-Americans, for instance, contributing up to $1 billion a year to Israel. Armenian-Americans send enough to earn Armenia the sobriquet of "the Israel of the Caucasus." Diasporas supply expertise, military recruits, and on occasion political leadership to the homeland. They often pressure their home governments to adopt more nationalist and assertive policies towards neighboring countries. Recent cases' in the United States show that they can be a source of spies used to gather information for their homeland governments.
Most important, diasporas can influence the actions and policies of their host country and co-opt its resources and influence to serve the interests of their homeland. Ethnic groups have played active roles in politics throughout American history. Now, ethnic diaspora groups proliferate, are more active, and have greater self-consciousness, legitimacy, and political clout. In recent years, diasporas have had a major impact on American policy towards Greece and Turkey, the Caucasus, the recognition of Macedonia, support for Croatia, sanctions against South Africa, aid for black Africa, intervention in Haiti, NATO expansion, sanctions against Cuba, the controversy in Northern Ireland, and the relations between Israel and its neighbors. Diaspora-based policies may at times coincide with broader national interests, as could arguably be the case with NATO expansion, but they are also often pursued at the expense of broader interests and American relations with long-standing allies. Overall, as James R. Schlesinger observed in a 1997 lecture at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United States has "less of a foreign policy in a traditional sense of a great power than we have the stapling together of a series of goals put forth by domestic constituency groups . . . The result is that American foreign policy is incoherent. It is scarcely what one would expect from the leading world power."
Schlesinger had to recognize, however, that multiculturalism and heightened ethnic consciousness have caused many political leaders to believe this is "the appropriate way to make foreign policy. " In the scholarly community some argue that diasporas can help promote American values in their home countries and hence "the participation of ethnic disaporas in shaping U.S. foreign policy is a truly positive phenomenon."(6) The validity of diaspora interests was a central theme at a May 1996 conference on "Defining the National Interest: Minorities and U.S. Foreign Policy in the 21st century." Conference participants attacked the Cold War definition of national interest and what was described as "the traditional policy community's apparent animosity toward the very idea of minority involvement in international affairs." Conferees explored "the experiences of Jewish-Americans and Cuban-Americans and sought to extract lessons from the way these two; groups succeeded in influencing foreign policy while others failed." The sponsorship of this conference by the New York Council on Foreign Relations, once the capstone institution of the foreign policy establishment, was the ultimate symbol of the triumph of diaspora interests over national interests in American foreign policy.
The displacement of national interests by commercial and ethnic interests reflects the domesticization of foreign policy. Domestic politics and interests have always inevitably and appropriately influenced foreign policy. Now, however, previous assumptions that the foreign and domestic policymaking processes differ from each other for important reasons no longer hold. For an understanding of American foreign policy it is necessary to study not the interests of the American state in a world of competing states but rather the play of economic and ethnic interests in American domestic politics. At least in recent years, the latter has been a superb predictor of foreign policy stands. Foreign policy, in the sense of actions consciously designed to promote the interests of the United States as a collective entity in relation to similar collective entities, is slowly but steadily disappearing.
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